by Lily Chan
Looking into the horizon, her eyes were distant with the strength of trees and gingko, with some old wisdom she had sipped in her sleep. She was the Grace Kelly of the family’s photo albums. Her two boys, Kazuhiko and Nobuhiko, gathered at her feet like cherubs.
Akio married Ranko, a girl with a heart-shaped face. On his wedding night he woke Shigeo, who was sleeping in one of the rooms in the hostel.
“What are you doing here?” Shigeo said, astonished. “Shouldn’t you be with Ranko?”
“I don’t know what to do, I’m freaking out. Let me sleep here tonight.”
“But it’s your wedding night. You should be with her!”
“I’m too scared, I’m telling you. Move over.”
Shigeo was amused and annoyed, but made space for his brother. “Poor Ranko,” he kept repeating, and the next day recounted the incident to the rest of the family, who then tormented Akio over his first-night blues.
As if to rebut their teasing, Ranko soon became pregnant. Akio marched around the house with the blissful glow of a father-to-be.
The 1964 Olympics were held in Tokyo. Swarms of athletes and tourists booked up accommodation. Toyo watched the opening ceremony on television, where a young man, born on the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, ran up the dais and lit the torch.
She had never believed that a city destroyed by bombing and fire would be rebuilt so rapidly. Tears came to her eyes as she remembered the tin of spoiled sugar her mother had secreted in the backyard, the precious sugar she had hoped to save when everything else had burned down.
Now railway lines extended a latticework across the country with the new bullet trains speeding between Osaka, Tokyo and Shinosaka. Apartment complexes, shopping districts and new industrial precincts multiplied. Yoshio’s old school, nestled behind the bamboo forest, was replaced by houses and newly paved streets.
The winter when Yoshio had just turned fifteen, Toyo visited a wholesale warehouse stocked with clothes and accessories. She selected a range of gloves – embroidered, velveteen, woollen mitts, faux-fur lined, fingerless – from shades of grey and black to red and fern green. She packaged pairs neatly in plastic, labelled prices with white stickers. She set up a stall in front of the Tenma train station, rose early in the mornings to catch the commuters, and stayed till evening when they returned from work.
The gloves sold magnificently; she was busy during those eight winter weeks, and Yoshio would come after school to help with the sales and pack up. When the last batch of gloves was sold, she was delirious with joy. She ordered a tailor-made leather coat; a design close-fitted to her body, a vibrant wine red.
She booked a weekend at a five-star resort for Toyomi, Yoshio and Kazuko. They ate a multi-course dinner at a restaurant specialising in traditional Japanese cuisine. They went to the onsen. Toyo entered the water gingerly, lowering herself inch by inch, feeling the liquid creep up her spine, dampen her swimming costume.
“Okaasan!” Toyomi shouted, clinging to the side. She pushed off and flipped backwards against the water. Yoshio scythed the pool with amphibian intensity. The black stripes painted on the bottom of the pool wavered. Toyo took a deep breath and sank to the bottom, holding her nose. The water closed in over her head. They were the beautiful trio rotating around one another in perfect fidelity.
The Zhangs divided up their small commercial empire among themselves so that they and their children and descendants could all earn a comfortable living through retail and trade.
Ryu’s menswear shop was partitioned into stalls. Akio and Toyo rented these spaces out to individual businesses. Eventually there was a sushi shop; a tiny, narrow pub with a vintage-finish wooden bar, able to seat a handful of drinkers; and a shop that manufactured family seals and stamps.
But when Shigeo wanted to start his own business, he asked Toyo and Akio to vacate their tenants and give both floors of the old menswear shop to him. Akio agreed, but Toyo was aghast. The shop had occupied the ground floor, but the first floor had been her honeymoon residence. Giving it to Shigeo meant giving up a part of Ryu and the legacy she wished to pass on to his children.
Yoshio and Toyomi lay on the first floor of the wooden building and pressed their ear to the slats. They could hear Toyo arguing with the Zhangs. Shigeo grew increasingly contrite, but also stubborn – his priorities had shifted to his own burgeoning family, to his pregnant wife Gendi, and the need for a regular income.
Toyo trudged up the stairs with her eyes swollen from weeping and shouting. On the verge of being overridden by the Zhangs, she was angry at Ryu for leaving her behind.
Days and weeks passed with nothing resolved, and Toyo gave up. “It’s too late, Yoshio. I can’t keep it for you. I can’t do anything.”
But Yoshio had found a solution. “How about that place in Hattori that Otoya owns – can’t we ask for a trade-off? If Shigeo gets Father’s old building, we should be entitled to the Hattori hostel. We can move there and manage the property. Half the weekly profits can go to Otoya and half to us.”
The Zhangs accepted, so Toyo, Toyomi and Yoshio moved to Hattori. It was further from the city and surrounded by rice paddies.
the bell rings and rings
Toyomi had a perky bottom. It stuck out. When she was seven years old, her male teacher pinched it. When she was nine years old, her tutor leaned across the library desk and stroked her arm. “Come here, Toyomi-chan,” he murmured. When she was eleven years old, she walked up the stairs in her sports skirt and a teacher, walking behind her, placed his hand against her bloomers and squeezed. She yelped and ran. When she was thirteen years old, her teacher insisted that she sit close beside him.
There was something about Toyomi; she was so white, so vibrant, so excited. People flitted like moths to taste her laughter. Toyo looked at her daughter’s almost-European eyes and her pert nose and could almost forgive her self-absorption. Her menstrual periods began and Toyo, like her own mother before, showed Toyomi how to pad her knickers, how to wrap up the waste and bin it odourlessly. Toyo grew worried about the love letters bursting out of their letterbox. Boys leaned toward Toyomi in a tsunami of longing. Men on motorbikes chased after her school bus, hooting. It was only a matter of time before a young man stood at the doorstep requesting her hand in marriage.
Toyomi, with her flair for drama, her voice with its charm and range, her lovely face and figure, possessed the qualities of a performer.
Toyo monitored her daughter’s appearance, posture and inflections so they were contained within a set of principles and stringent etiquette. Her daughter was an extension of Toyo’s own hopes and desires. Toyomi writhed impatiently on this pin like a butterfly in an entomological collection. She felt her mother’s attempts to mould her to the form she desired and yearned for freedom.
The request came sooner than Toyo expected. She opened her door – the bell ringing – to one of the rich Chinese families in Osaka, the Dans. They owned an empire of shopping emporiums.
Toyomi’s suitor was a handsome young man, with sleek hair framing a square jaw. Toyomi was dainty porcelain slotting under his arm. She returned late from dates with her new fiancé, her hair tousled, carrying armfuls of red roses and expensive handbags and jackets and shoes, her too-red lips swollen with sake. The fiancé burned rubber on his U-turn and gave a fleeting, intimate smile; she acknowledged it with almost hysterical laughter. This exchange troubled Toyo; it kept flashing in her mind. Toyomi was only sixteen years old.
Toyo had not counted on Toyomi’s eager readiness to marry. And despite her misgivings, she was happy and proud too. Her daughter’s beauty had hooked her suitor like a fish. They were in love; she could see it. It would all turn out well. It would be the most wonderful wedding ever.
Toyo also had not counted on the speed with which Okaya’s health would deteriorate. A colostomy bag was strapped to her belly, filling up slowly with
urine and excrement. Okaya did not want to change it in front of other people, she did not want other people to see it, so she stopped going to the onsen.
“My body hurts in all these places,” Okaya said. Yoshio took her to an acupuncturist, told him quietly, outside Okaya’s earshot, that the pain was internalised, that it was cancer of the large intestine which had spread throughout her body, and he should conduct his session without searching for a source of the pain.
Toyo visited Okaya in hospital almost every day. She took her to a café nearby and they ate cakes and drank cappuccinos and pretended everything was okay until Okaya began to vomit, and then Toyo stroked Okaya’s thin back and thinning hair, and held her until she stopped shaking. Another time, Toyo took Okaya to the hairdressers so they could colour her grey hair a radiant auburn.
They did not talk of her death, except once, when Okaya sighed, “I thought I would have time, you know, for myself, when the children all grew up. But the time I had was so short, it passed so quickly.” After a silence, she smiled. “The medicine they pump into my veins makes me feel like I’m already in heaven.”
The doctor said that Okaya had six months. Toyomi would marry in that time, as a last gift, a peace-of-mind tribute, to their beloved Okaya.
The decision to hold Toyomi’s wedding within six months was an easy one. Carrying it out was difficult. They took out a loan of five million yen. They shopped for Toyomi’s hope chest: cupboards, drawers, kitchenware and linen. They paid for the wedding venue, catering and printed invitations.
Toyomi returned from school every day to be faced with bags of shopping and an increasingly cluttered house. Yoshio did not attend a day of university over the next few months. There was never a moment when Toyo wasn’t rushing to get somewhere. There was never a moment when she felt rested and complete. All the time she had was consumed by this wedding, and she felt frightened by its hunger, its gargantuan list of tasks, swallowing her up.
Okaya asked if she could move out of the hospital and stay with Toyo, Yoshio and Toyomi in Hattori. They panicked, but they accepted, and moved her into a spare room. Okaya watched them hurry in and out of the house, carrying goods, looking tense. They juggled a care routine for Okaya between them; cooking her rice porridge and miso broth, changing her clothes and helping her walk up and down the stairs.
The Dans kept taking them out for dinner, forging the links between the two families that marriage would cement; the dinners were held at expensive, tasteful restaurants. Toyo felt breathless at the expectation that the meals be reciprocated. It was an exchange of social currency. Her daughter for their boy. A Chinese banquet for a night of Italian pasta. It was love as a series of transactions.
The week before the wedding, a truck loaded with furniture and gifts, decorated with strings of coloured triangle flags, delivered the goods to the Dan household. The passage of the truck symbolised the move of the bride.
Toyomi snapped at Yoshio as he moved a dressing table into place in her new room, “I don’t want it there. Why did you put it there?” His face closed up as he looked at her flushed face, her eyes feverish with the petulance born of a growing sense of entitlement. She had the distracted and animated gaze of someone presented with a buffet of extravagant dishes.
In the flurry of wedding preparations, there was little thought given to the impact on Toyomi’s schooling. Her high-school teacher paid a visit to Toyo’s house. “Toyomi has recorded a number of absences from school. She is short of the minimum compulsory attendance by one day. Without the minimum attendance she cannot graduate.”
“And what can be done about this?” Toyo asked.
“I can tweak her attendance record.”
There was silence as Toyo digested this. The growing silence, too, alerted Toyo that to falsify Toyomi’s attendance record the teacher would require a bribe.
Toyo and Yoshio exchanged glances. Simultaneously, they opened their mouths and said, “No.”
Toyo had nothing more to say, so she ushered the teacher out of the door, bowing perfunctorily. When she shut the door, she began to cry.
She brooded over it for weeks, but did not mention the teacher’s visit to Toyomi.
At the wedding, Toyomi looked like a white doll. Her pretty eyes were augmented with mascara, her lips painted red, and her white wedding dress engulfed her. Her husband stood by her side, his square jaw taut with expectation.
“Such a good-looking couple,” guests said to Toyo. There was music, singing, karaoke, toasts and speeches.
Toyo watched her daughter; would she be able to hold up under the scrutiny? There was so much of it, beaming in from her new husband’s tree of relatives: aunties and cousins and grandparents and colleagues. The old Chinese of Japan gathered around tables and feasted, watching another union of their descendants.
Toyomi conceived on her honeymoon. Her slender body ballooned. Her breasts transformed into plump mangoes resting against the watermelon of her belly. In order to eat, she balanced plates of food precariously on top. Toyo had a nightmare that Toyomi’s body burst open and all that remained were two black watermelon seeds, shrivelled at the bottom of a shell.
The scans showed twins. One baby curled up in the corner of her womb as if trying to hide; the other baby spread out luxuriously as if bathing in the sunshine of an amniotic beach. Its legs were spread wide enough to see the tiny cleft between its legs.
Toyomi refused to breastfeed. Her little boy nuzzled toward her swollen breast, his fist clenched tight against the swell, and she shrieked in disgust. “My breasts will sag,” she said. “They will tug at my nipples with their teeth.”
Toyo argued to no avail: “Breast milk is good for children. It’s essential. I raised you and Yoshio on breast milk.” She was shocked by the repulsion on her daughter’s face. Perhaps it had been too soon. Perhaps she had come to motherhood too soon.
Toyo touched the soft skin of her two perfect pink grandchildren and wanted to cry. Their eyes were shut tight.
Four things happened in quick succession. Okaya’s Siamese cat, with its short white fur and its nose, ears, paws and the tip of its tail dipped in black ink, died. Okaya’s bird, which had moped in its cage for five years, shuffling its yellow plumage and tapping its beak, died. The huge mirror in the hallway fell down – it did not shatter, but the cord holding it up was cut, inexplicably, into two clean pieces. Then the hospital called with the news of Okaya’s death.
the impossibility of a leap
Otoya degenerated into an irascible old man. He smeared excrement on the walls and threw handfuls at the maids. Holding towels and dirty clothes, they scattered before him in quick succession. “He’s impossible!”
Takeo came every week and carried his father to the bathroom, sponged him down, wrapped his bedsores.
He tapped at the wall with his walking stick. “I want to go out,” he cried. “I want to go walking.” He was a typhoon of unexplained anguish, slowly winding down, inert, facing the grey ceiling for days and greeting his family with prickly confusion. “Where is Okaya? Why isn’t she here? Who are you?” he asked his sons and daughters.
Yoshio told Toyo that he had prayed for Otoya to be granted a day in his body, so he could walk and run around the city, visit his favourite places. But no more would he trawl through the hostel with a ladder and a satchel of tools, shouting at his sons to help him. No more would he sit with a damp towel on his neck, a bottle of beer in hand, watching the children run up and down the laneway. The fierce energy coiled within his frame had nowhere to leap.
Toyo cried with relief and gratitude when he recognised her. When she entered the room, his wrinkled face relaxed into a smile, and he would clutch her hands, asking how everything was, telling her what a good daughter-in-law she was, their sweet, sacrificing Toyo-chan.
At his funeral a dozen beggars turned up. They wept and threw themselves bef
ore his memorial in their shabby clothes and dirt-lined fingernails. The family watched them in astonishment. One of the beggars said, “He helped me out so many times when I was hungry and had no money. He was a good man, a great man.”
He had disappeared progressively, the lines on his face growing more graven. Towards the end, even the bed seemed to swallow him up. For Toyo, his departure was tinged with relief, a sense of inevitability. Yet she was tear-struck when she saw a floral towel in a department store, similar to one she had helped Otoya pick out as a gift for a newborn grandchild. In the hospital, Otoya had held the baby in his arms and said, “This child is innocent of anything – of arguments between adults, of bad feeling or history.” A warmth glowed in Toyo’s chest at the memory; his words had been close to a benediction.
the note
Kazuko told Toyo she had had an upset stomach for a few days. Diarrhoea and cramps. She kneaded her stomach with restless fingers. Then she found blood in the toilet bowl.
The doctors prodded and scanned and took tests; she was diagnosed with advanced cancer of the bowels. The doctor informed her husband, Genkan, and Toyo, but did not disclose the diagnosis to Kazuko herself. Medical practice recommended against revealing to patients a terminal diagnosis on the basis that it would only lower morale.
Genkan and Toyo suffered through this enforced silence, but Kazuko knew them too well.
A cancer specialist came to inspect her records. When her regular doctor was out of the room, Kazuko said casually, “So, I’ve been told I have cancer. I wonder how much longer I can expect to live?”
The specialist replied, “I estimate a year at most.”